The two healthbar theory of burnout | Hacker News Reader

The two healthbar theory of burnout

jdwyah.substack.com

41 pointsjdwyah31 comments

It’s weird how the burnout threshold varies so much person-to-person. I wonder if this is mostly genetic or if there are ways to train yourself to handle immense strain before reaching burnout.

For me, my burnout threshold tends to depend on the type of stressor. I could handle multiple all-nighters doing research when I was in grad school. Granted, I felt physically horrible afterward, but mentally the work always remained exciting and as soon as I caught up on sleep I’d get right back into it.

On the other hand, interpersonal conflict is very rare for me, but when it does occur I tend to lose the drive for whatever I was doing quickly and look for a change as soon as I’m able to manage.

I suspect (not an expert, never experienced burnout myself yet thankfully) it depends on how much you can let go, how much you allow yourself to relax, and how you manage workload.

I've seen loads of people get over-excited - that is, they want to do all the things, and then some. Day job, second job, personal projects, conferences, social life, they just say 'yes' to everything. And they feel great! They get paid a lot, they get positive feedback, they genuinely enjoy what they're doing. But it's an addictive trap. Not saying you shouldn't do what you want to do when it comes to work, but set some limits.

People who can't set limits, who work overtime on the regular, who feel like they need to do even more in their spare time, who allow their work to interrupt their free time, they will be more susceptible to burnout. Because it feels good to them. Or because they're afraid they're not doing enough, or will run behind, or ???.

> If you get exposed to a lot of glucocorticoids, you're more at risk now for depression. You can see this epidemiologically: you get people, and statistically, before their first major depressive episode something awful stressful occurs. Have one of those first depressive episodes, due to some stressful event, you come out the other side eventually. You are no more at risk for depression than anybody else. Along comes a second major stressor, and you fall into depression, come out the other end, no more at risk than anyone else for depression. Somewhere around the fourth or fifth stress-induced depression, something happens and things start cycling on their own there and you no longer need a major stressor to cause you to get depressed like that. That's when the clocks are off and running. That's the transition.[0]

0. Dr. Robert Sapolsky, PhD, 2009 - https://youtu.be/NOAgplgTxfc?t=2165&si=P0pg-W5lOe3n0LWb

We don't need to resort to tortured video game analogies to talk about this. What the piece is talking about is the difference between being physically drained and being spiritually drained.

People can tolerate a lot of exertion as long as it has a purpose. This isn't unique to work. Ask any parent, any soldier, what have you. As long as there's some meaning to what you're doing you can tolerate a lot. But if you're stuck in something that is soul sucking and has no purpose, that'll really eat away at people.

This medicalized language of burnout really just hides the fact that what quite a few people are dealing with is that they're stuck in dead-end, pointless jobs. As the saying goes we've taken some of the smartest people and have them figure out how to get other people to click on ads. I suppose it's easier to blame it on individuals than talk about the meaning of work in general.

If you prefer a more research-based take on burnout, check out [1]. It cites actual burnout researchers (crazy idea..).

[1] https://commoncog.com/g/burnout/

Some worthwhile discussion on https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/16elb37/how_we... as well.

"(...) if you find yourself opening the emails, it’s likely you’re reaching the end" if you are a permie. Opening emails from recruiters is a twice-daily routine for contractors.

Tangential but I usually burn out when expectations don't match reality.

E.g. When I worked hard to build and deliver something but then management rates me lower due to BS stack ranking. Or when I grind to roll something out judiciously but management is pissed that the rollout happened 1 week later than expected - even when there are no customers waiting for it.

In my experience, a happy job can easily turn into a dreadful place when management nitpicks on nonsense.

I think people use burnout for two distinct things: project/work burnout and job burnout. Obviously, the first can easily lead to the second, especially since a lot of places have a burnout staffing structure/cycle where they burn ppl out and then restaff.

I've had both (multiple times) but in places that are more supportive you can still push yourself hard on projects and both you and your team will avoid project burnout, at least sometimes. With this it's about pacing rests/vacations, having good team coverage to unblock each other, protective management so not too much BS comes at a team especially in exhaustion points...

Even with great jobs/supportive teams, work burnout can happen. For me, it's often when I've gone past some organizational cycle where everything is repeating from the first play of the record (eg leadership cycles or "full site redesign project" iterations).

I think the OP is more or less talking about these two types of burnout with the inner vs outer bars.

It's funny how I keep coming around to Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs" theory when I see these posts. It's not perfect, but it seems to describe 90% of the reasons why people get burnt out. Part of your pyramid crumbles, the value of your self-actualization starts slipping.

Whatever works for you, I guess.

I like what he says about just chilling out a little bit. I was having trouble getting myself to do any work, and after I switched teams, started getting more sleep, and was un-saddled with ten years of random responsibilities accumulated from being on the same team for way too long. Things are mostly better. Sometimes you've just got to feel a win and do something simple to remind yourself that you can still perform. Understanding the problem you're trying to solve really helps.

> Even if you think you’re happy, if you find yourself opening the emails, it’s likely you’re reaching the end.

Strongly disagree with this. It's when I'm happiest that I open the most recruiting emails because I have the energy to follow through and really vet the new opportunities. It's the time when I need to be sold on the new job rather than just looking for any port in the storm.

This concept has always fascinated me because it feels so alien to me. I've never felt burned out for more than a couple hours. Having dinner and taking a walk resets me back into a good spot.

Not saying people are lying; but it's weird how much it varies from person-to-person.

If it only lasts a couple of hours, then it's not burnout.

Yes, "toasted" is not "burned".

That's awesome. You're staying in the top health bar. Challenges of the day that then reset and you're back at full health.

I was going to start typing about the things that take me past that point, but... you're in such a good place. I don't want to ruin it :)

Burn out can be dodged for most of your career if you actually like what you do and you avoid environments that are a bad fit for you. I've never experienced burnout, but I have a lot of friends who have and to me their key problem is they stayed when they felt the drain. The moment I become truly apathetic towards a job and don't even have professional investment in it, I just quit and find another job. I've felt the weight of a job that is just a bad fit for you and it eats at you.

I'm currently enduring that now. Unfortunately, I cannot just quit. I and my child have very expensive healthcare needs now and I need to be picky about the healthcare offerings. It's a very slow search because I'm at the top of what I can reasonably expect for what I can give. I can take jobs with more responsibility and excel, but at the cost of my child's health, so that's out. I won't trade pay for her care. I've looked at dozens of insurance plans from perspective employers and reminded myself why I took such a dull job. I'd take a significant pay cut to move anywhere else just from medical bills.

So, I sit at this job bored and apathetic. It's a slow march to burn out. From an outside view it doesn't make any sense to take a new job. This is the trap many of my friends fall into. But burnout isn't always about if a job is hard. It's mostly about how it makes you feel emotionally which will trickle down to physically eventually.

Plenty of others have already chimed in why it's likely you haven't experienced actual burnout if that's the case, but an analogy might make it clearer:

You've experienced headaches, but never experienced a migraine.

When you get a headache you can just pop an over-the-counter pill to numb it out. Migraines are a fundamental neurological shift orders of magnitude more debilitating - that Advil would be like a drop in the bucket.

It sounds like you have a healthy relationship to work - keep doing whatever you are doing that is keeping you fundamentally mentally healthy!!

If it’s a couple of hours I’d say it’s just “exhaustion”?

You've never got into the second health bar.

I'm curious what type of job you have. I felt the same as you the entire time I was an individual coder. Once I got into management that all changed, and the higher I climbed the tougher it was. I never felt like I needed a vacation when I was coding, but now I need a long weekend, etc, every 3 to 4 months.

Probably 1/3 IC, 1/3 manager, 1/3 eng PM. Small team.

It took me way too long to read this correctly. I thought it was about the toffee bar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heath_bar

As far as I can tell this is totally made up. Where is the evidence that you have a "core bar" that cannot be replenished? None is cited in this article.

I don't think it's supposed to be a scientific theory. Just a (maybe helpful or maybe not) way of thinking about burnout.

Anecdotal evidence might be helpful here too, but they didn’t have that either.

Is it so hard to find out that burnout is created by a society that glorifies productivity, success, gains, above all things? We are not robots. We are humans. It is not an individual problem, our society is sick.

We all suffer from the human condition.

> fundamental attribution error, also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect, is a cognitive attribution bias where observers underemphasize situational and environmental factors for the behavior of an actor while overemphasizing dispositional or personality factors.

We can have differently shaped societies, and they have different impacts on their members.

Yes. Of course personal traits are important, but depression and burnout as an epidemic level, are essentially a problem that emerged and worsen in the last decades, even with the improvement of therapies, drugs and techniques. Why?

> One of the first things we discover in these [peer support] groups is that personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.

-- Carol Hanisch, 1970

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